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History, Horses and the Luck of the Irish

The centuries-old Fair of Muff gives a glimpse of Ireland's past—and changes one family's future

By

Gerard Baker

Updated Aug. 13, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET

As a father of five young daughters, I get used to handling difficult questions.

"Are we there yet?," I've found, is generally best ignored, or at least deflected with some entertaining semantic ruminations on the meaning of the word "there," or, even better, a brief distracting foray into the puzzle of Zeno's Paradox.

"Can I get my belly button pierced?" is a more direct assault on the very fabric of our culture and needs to be dealt with unequivocally and decisively: "Not until you're 7."

A seller at the 2008 Fair of Muff with some merchandise
Alex Coleman

One I've found quite easy to answer has nonetheless cropped up with insistent frequency over the years.

"Can I get a pony?"

We live in a big city, in a medium-size house already bursting with children, their friends, cats and viruses. We have a yard that an arthritic mare would cover in a two-second trot. Ponies, from what little I know of them, require feed, their own housing, space. A prairie, perhaps.

"No, you can't have a pony."

It's cruel, but I find such directness to be an integral part of the education of the young mind: a necessary recognition of the brutal accountability to reality we all must live with.

Folk dancing at the fair in 2008
Alex Coleman

So how, precisely, do I find myself the father of a teenage owner of one five-year-old, skewbald, equine quadruped, about 13 hands tall, who answers, rather inattentively, to the name Buttons?

The luck of the Irish is the answer, vicariously acquired on a happy family vacation spent with my wife's relatives last summer in the welcoming heart of Ireland. Specifically, a spot of fortune that befell us at a centuries-old horse festival, the Fair of Muff, in County Cavan midway between Dublin and Belfast.

The fair has taken place in mid-August every year for 400 years in the deep, rain-lashed green countryside just outside the town of Kingscourt.

Joe LeMonnier

The promotional efforts of Irish tourism promise the "real" Ireland, which as far as I can make out involves cheery old men drinking Guinness and wishing "top of the morning" to no one in particular.

That stereotype hasn't been true for decades. At the end of the last century, Ireland was the very model of a vibrant, modern economy, among the wealthiest in Europe. But in the financial crisis of 2007-08 a mighty real-estate bubble burst, and today the country is still stumbling like a dazed man through the postdiluvian landscape of recession.

You can see it in the economic geography of a place like Kingscourt, busy town and ancestral home of my wife's family, the Gargans. Here, the gently welcoming stone of the traditional homes and shops and churches is interspersed with houses ambitiously constructed in the boom, many of them empty.

But the tourism promoters had it right in at least one important respect. Ireland is still a place where the mores and manners of modern life are rooted in a gentler age. And you can still find glimpses of that earlier Ireland, when life moved courteously not at the speed of a modern mortgage approval but at the reassuring pace of a horse-drawn cart.

There used to be countless such fairs all over Ireland. From across the country, horse owners, from professional traders to the local smallholder with his trusty old mare, would gather over a drink or two, to negotiate terms and exchange a few observations on the state of the world.

The Fair of Muff began in 1608, it is said, when King James I approved a license to trade horses to a local merchant.

The details may have changed over four centuries but the central plot and characters surely haven't. Hardy men in heavy raincoats and feathered hats ponder the transaction, while the womenfolk (traditional roles survive here) cheerfully distribute bowls of Irish stew and plates of fried pork sausages. Children take a welcome break from videogames and text messages to relive an age when entertainment came from prancing dogs, singing puppeteers and mean fiddlers.

Cartlan's Thatched Pub, Kingscourt, County Cavan, Ireland.
Alamy

In a barn across the hillside, from morning till night, a bar serves a satisfying menu of traditional Irish libations while the locals—from infants to grandparents—dance to the distinctive tones of a folk band.

But as it has been for four centuries, the real business here is the horse trading.

It's fascinating to observe how the theater of the trade hasn't changed much. It's not unlike a modern used-car transaction between a couple of pros. The prospective buyer this time is peering into nostrils and inspecting the farrier's work rather than looking under the hood or kicking the tires.

Of course my daughters watched it all, entranced by the idea that so many horses—from great plodding shire horses to mini-Shetlands—were available at such good prices.

And so the inevitable question: "Can we get a pony, Daddy?"

The author's daughter Kitty with Buttons, which the family purchased at the Fair of Muff
Gerard Baker/The Wall Street Journal

There was no weakening in my iron resolve, despite the romanticism of the scene. It was still out of the question, a practical impossibility. But it was, I thought, vacation, and they were my adorable daughters, and so surely I had to make a small concession.

"You know what," I offered, "we'll buy a raffle ticket." The grand raffle—€2 ($2.66) a ticket—is a centerpiece of the event. And the first prize is a real live pony.

I'm no statistician but I could guess the odds, as hundreds of other fathers and mothers of clamorous children were similarly persuaded to buy their lottery tickets. My smaller daughters, of course, know better, and simply understood that having bought a ticket, they were more or less guaranteed the pony.

So we bought a ticket and moved on to the dancing and the Guinness and I thought no more about it. But somewhere some Irish charm, or perhaps some higher power, was conspiring to answer my daughters' prayers.

Horses at the Killorglin horse fair in County Kerry, Ireland in August 1951
Fox Photos/Getty Images

Late that evening, as we spent another evening of wonderful Irish hospitality, we got an excited call from Ann Farrelly, my wife's cousin, who had introduced us to the Fair of Muff. My eldest daughter, Kitty, had won the pony.

And I'm obliged to say, for all my misgivings, he's a fine animal. He's still in Ireland, happily roaming the fields with stablemates that belong to my wife's relatives. In fact he's the perfect pet in many ways. My daughters love him, but some other very kind family gets to look after him and my girls get free visiting rights. Irish luck, indeed.

We'll be back at the Fair of Muff again next week, and probably every year after that. But we won't be buying a raffle ticket.